Autism, Doxology, and the Nature of Christian Worship

Abstract

Brian Brock’s Wondrously Wounded teaches us to approach “disability” through the lens of doxology. The first section of this response argues that Brock’s doxological approach combines and expands (rather than rejects) the previously dominant inclusivity and prophetic approaches. I then move on to consider the leitmotif of praise and worship for disability theology. The remainder of this paper puts the doxological approach to constructive use by considering what the sensory and communicative differences that characterize autistic experience might reveal about the nature of Christian worship. It is argued that the interwoven sensory and social differences that characterize autism reveal how the Spirit illuminates the very materiality of the world. The Spirit thereby uses our doxologies to enable all human beings to perceive and respond to God and establish a world in common, the Kingdom of God.

Keywords:

• autism
• Brian Brock
• doxology
• sensory difference
• stimming
• worship

Brian Brock’s Wondrously Wounded teaches us to approach “disability” through the lens of doxology (Brock, 2019). The first section of this response argues that Brock’s doxological approach combines and expands (rather than rejects) the previously dominant inclusivity and prophetic approaches. I then move on to consider the leitmotif of praise and worship for disability theology. The remainder of this paper puts the doxological approach to constructive use by considering what the sensory and communicative differences that characterize autistic experience might reveal about the nature of Christian worship. Taking inspiration from 1 John 4:12 and Romans 8:28, I argue that the interwoven sensory and social differences that characterize autism reveal how the Spirit illuminates the very materiality of the world. The Spirit thereby uses our doxologies to enable all human beings to perceive and respond to God and establish a world in common, the Kingdom of God.

From inclusivity to prophecy to doxology

Theological claims regarding the doctrine of humanity must be claims that can be made of all human beings; we might call this “the inclusivity principle of disability theology.” However, inclusivity, or rather mere inclusivity via accessibility, has come under critique in recent disability theology, including in Wondrously Wounded (Brock, 2019, p. 1; cf. Swinton, 2012, p. 182 and 2016, pp. 87–114). The concern of this critique is that mere inclusivity protects the status quo. By limiting the response to disability to only making certain spaces more physically accessible, mere inclusivity allows who already inhabit such spaces to feel magnanimous and does not challenge the basic beliefs and value systems that create marginalization and inequality. Whilst Brock shows how contemporary churches often fall into this trap, he also sees the church as one place in society where we can be liberated from this logic (Brock, 2019, p. 232). As Brock writes, “Christian theology offers a politics of ‘redeemed communion’ that displaces the politics of both exclusion and inclusion.” (Brock, 2019, p. 201)

Alongside disability theologians such as Frances Young, Hans Reinders, John Swinton and Amos Yong, Brock follows what might be called “the prophetic thesis of disability.” This thesis highlights the way that persons with significant physical or cognitive impairments can play a prophetic role in bringing about a krisis (judgment) upon the ableist assumptions of liberal society and even some eschatological hopes of the Christian church (Brock, 2019, pp. 94, 172–185, 225–26; cf. Swinton, 2016, p. 8–11; Young, 1990, p. 142; Yong, 2007, pp. 259–92). Brock maintains the strength and protest of this approach whenever he speaks of God’s (and only God’s) “militant” “assault of grace” against sin (Brock, 2019, p. 237–38). For Brock, the personal experience of raising Adam has forced him to interrogate his own emotional responses to different situations and to call into question the very “ordering of materiality,” in which we currently live (Brock, 2019, pp. 175, 180–85). This prophetic role is the “strange vocation” of those labeled disabled, including those who are autistic (Brock, 2019, p. 172).

Yet, the prophetic thesis of disability also runs into a dilemma. To characterize the “disabled” as prophets of judgment can instrumentalize those labeled disabled, reinforce their marginalization and prevent them from being fully embraced and included in community (Capretto, 2017). The prophetic office “is one of suffering” and a “radically contingent ministry, continually shaped by social context” (McFarland, 2019, p. 26). Whilst suffering in and because of unjust social contexts forms an undeniable aspect of the experience of those labeled disabled (this is the “wounded” part of Brock’s title) to over emphasize this role leaves a question for what we can then say about the flourishing and agency of the prophet (Brock, 2020). The danger is that the message from God that the readers of “disabled” bodies are prepared to receive are easily blinkered by perceptions of (only) lack, impairment, dependency and vulnerability (Brock, 2019, p. 194). As Brock observes, too often it is not their lives that are revelations from God, but “their social disablement has been operationalized for theological ends” (Brock, 2019, p. 219). When such blinkering occurs it precludes “annunciations” of mercy, joy, freedom, and fullness of life, and even a revelation of what it means to be healthy (Brock, 2019, pp. 145, 162), which the Spirit may be gifting to the church in the wondrous bodies of our fellow (“disabled”) members.

It is for this reason that Brock seeks to expand the prophetic thesis of disability to include the welcome and embrace of inclusivity, resulting in a doxological approach. This is not just a matter of expanding the reading of Adam’s body from one mode (judgment) to just one more mode (annunciation). Through moving stories of where Adam chooses to sit in church and how he dances with an immigrant busking in a busy shopping center, Brock emphasizes Adam’s agency as the Spirit gives Her gifts to the church (Brock, 2019, pp. 222–23, 235). It is not just Adam’s role in society, nor even just his wonderous body that speaks a divine word, but God also works through what Adam chooses to do with his body, his personality, and how he communicates to others. Any similarity between the gifts that Adam’s church receives through him, and the gifts that my own autistic brother’s church receives by his participation in worship, will be because of God’s faithfulness, not because Adam and Philip are both “disabled,” or even both autistic.

The inclusivity principle and the prophetic thesis are incomplete apart from one another. The inclusivity principle seeks to draw people into comforting structures and patterns of a pre-established community but may not thereby require any change on behalf of that community. By contrast, the prophetic thesis calls the community to radical change, but may thereby leave the prophets at the city gates as isolated heroes, like John Chrysostom’s beggars at the church door (Brock, 2019, p. 219). In fact, the lives of prophets are often unjustly cut short.^. Whilst this may match the experience of many people who are labeled disabled, particularly those labeled such before birth, it is not a reality I wish to endorse by locking those labeled disabled into this particular role. The question is not which of these approaches to disability theology is better; rather it is, how do we do both? How do we receive those who bear the label “disabled” or “autistic,” as a word of judgment from the Spirit calling the church into the likeness of Christ, whilst simultaneously empowering those same people to be fully enveloped in the loving arms of mother-church? Brock has offered us a “doxological approach” in order to combine the best of both inclusivity and prophecy and to avoid the twin pitfalls of marginalization and romanticization.

The leitmotif of praise

I now want to move beyond what Brock has said explicitly by providing a more constructive account of Christian worship that builds upon the doxological approach he has so carefully laid out for us. An expanded concept of worship and praise is a leitmotif throughout Wondrously Wounded. Brock describes this book as his witness to Adam’s “song of praise,” a stand against the “misdirected praise” of pre-natal testing, and describes the Church’s learning to embrace every human body as discovering “what it means to inhabit Christian praise” (Brock, 2019, pp. x, 97). On a practical level, the doxological approach calls for (at least) two kinds of responses in worship. First, the church is to praise and thank God for those labeled disabled in their midst, because “God has given greater honor to the socially marginalized” (Brock, 2019, p. 216). Brock’s celebration of his son Adam throughout this book is a model for such praise. Second, as full members of the body of Christ we must worship with, in deliberate and sympathetic communication with (not merely in the same room as) those who are labeled disabled. It is this second aspect of the doxological approach that I wish to focus on in the remainder of my paper.

I not only want to read the lives of those labeled disabled or autistic as a word from God, but also to listen to the (sometimes non-verbal) words that are spoken to God by autistic Christians, as true and full members of Christ’s body. As Brock writes of Wondrously Wounded, it is an attempt to “listen to and join in with his [Adam’s] song of praise” (Brock, 2019, p.xiv). Human worship is always a response to God’s prior word and address, and so this is not to posit spiritual superpowers to those who are different. All remain equally in need of the Word of love and mercy spoken before us and the Spirit’s aid in both hearing God’s words and responding to them. But it is often as the church worships – as humans read the words of Scripture, preach, sing, pray, kneel, lift hands and dance – that God’s voice can be heard. Listening to God and worshiping together are not synonymous activities, but they are often simultaneous and interwoven. Put another way, the call and response structure of Christian worship requires we maintain a logical priority of God’s call as distinct from human response, but this is not always experienced as two separate moments in time.

When shared communal worship, autistic and non-autistic together in the Body of Christ, is the starting point for thinking about disability theology, then a new kind of question emerges: what do people with autism reveal about being the Body of Christ, and about our common humanity? As Brock writes, disability is not “a marginal note to the human condition” (Brock, 2019, p. xvii). In this way, the experience of autism is not only a matter of inclusion and/or judgment heard from the margins of the church, but an opportunity for constructive and central insights into the nature of the human relationship to God shared by all. (We might note the difference between theological insights, which I am gleaning from what autistic people have in common, and the Spirit’s gifts that are particular to individual autistic persons and their churches.) This is not to say, “we’re all a little bit autistic,” although I am aware that my desire to de-pathologize autism could be read this way. Instead, it is to say that our accounts of what it means to be fully and wholly human must not exclude the distinct and particular experience of what it means to be autistic.

The claim of full and whole humanity must go beyond a designation of belonging to a particular species of homo sapiens, which can be problematically reduced to a particular genetic heritage – the problems of prioritizing genetic identification over interpersonal relationship is something Brock has quite a lot to say about in connection to pre-natal testing, but which I will not pursue here. In Christianity, the belonging that is most relevant is where human bodies belong to Jesus in being his Body, the Church. As Grant McCaskill writes in Autism and the Church, “we approach autism as something that has been united to Christ and his body” (McCaskill, 2019, p. 64). McCaskill and Brock (Brock, 2019, p. 194) both argue that questions about what it means to be human must be considered in the context of the body of Christ, that is, as connected with ecclesiology and not solely with the doctrine of creation. I take this methodological starting point as the basis for the constructive work below.

Learning to worship together: Theological reflection on hypo-/hyper- sensitivities and stimming

No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us. (1 John 4:12)

For we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. (Rom. 8:28)

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously drew attention to the interpretative aspect of all perception and sensory experience, what he called “seeing-as.” His famous example is the duck-rabbit drawing, which most people can see the same set of lines at one moment depicting a duck and at the next moment depicting a rabbit (Wittgenstein 1953, p. 194). This example is helpful because it is relatively easy to switch between seeing the duck and the rabbit, but this is also what makes the duck-rabbit picture an almost unique case. Most of the time, seeing-as (the way we interpret and experience the world) is pre-theoretical, and so not open to conscious control because it is the way that the human brain receives and processes sensory information. In this section, I want to explore how the seeing-as of autistic people might be different, and illuminative, in the context of church worship.

One central experiential difference, which is now considered part of the core diagnostic criteria for autism, is hyper-sensitivity and/or hypo-sensitivity. That is, autistic people will often receive and process sensory inputs differently. Marco et al. (2011), estimate this at over 96% of autistic children and Leekam et al. (2007) found this to be the case for 185 of 200 autistic adults. Often the amount of vivid detail that is received is higher – less is filtered out – such that the person feels overloaded and overwhelmed in a busy environment that neurotypicals would negotiate easily. Alternatively, sensory information might feel dimmed or reduced. A hyposensitive person might need help avoiding unfelt injuries, and might perform rocking, fidgeting or other self-stimulating behaviors to help engage with the world around them. It is not just a matter of more or less sensory information, but a different way of processing and living in our shared material world. It is not that the sensory organs themselves are impaired (apart from the possibility of co-morbidities), but the filter or interpretation of these inputs is different such that life in a world constructed for neurotypical senses can be painful or confusing. It is not the seeing itself, but the Wittgensteinian seeing-as. I am not primarily speaking about the seeing-as of the “gaze of the ‘normal’ masses,” which is a central concern of Wondrously Wounded, but I am drawing our attention to the seeing-as of autistic people themselves (Brock, 2019, p. 219).

Grant Macaskill has recently called for churches to be more attentive to the sensory environment that they create (McCaskill, 2019, pp. 117–124). Olivia Bustion records autistic Christians discussing on an online forum the difficulty of attending church due to the “loud music, complicated surroundings, glad-handing, back-slapping, elbow rubbing and hugging” (Bustion, 2017, p. 670). McCaskill is concerned that we become aware of and work to remove the sensory “stumbling block or hindrances” (Rom. 14:13) that prevent autistic Christians from fully participating and engaging in gathered worship (McCaskill, 2019, pp. 119–120). If we refuse to do this, then it is likely that we have created “idols out of our traditions” (McCaskill, 2019, p. 123). Here the revelatory role of autism comes into focus after, and only in so far as there is, resistance to the inclusive principle and the “iconoclasm of fidelity” that inclusion demands (Carnes, 2018, pp. 12–16). Brock includes this in a more positive light when he reports how Adam’s presence in church “liberates” their congregation from “ideals of performance and aesthetic purity” (Brock, 2019, pp. 223–224, 236). McCaskill concludes, what autistic Christians “struggle with is often the performance of a worldly culture, rather than the practicing of genuinely biblical worship” (McCaskill 2019, p. 126).

But can we go further than this hope for a more inclusive environment, or the prophetic witness that comes if such inclusion is resisted? Brock certainly invites us to. We can move forward by remembering that whilst such iconoclasms of fidelity require us to remove the sensory hindrances to autistic worship, we must also resist “iconoclasms of temptation” that seek to strip back the sensory obtuseness of the material world and access some unmediated world of pure spirit or naked concept beneath (Carnes, 2018, pp. 15, 154–56). Such iconoclasms rest on the mistake of thinking that the sensory world is getting in the way of divine communication, rather than being the medium for it. The range of autistic hyper/hypo-sensitivities mean that what might typically be received as a less distracting sensory experience is just a different kind of sensory environment, a new way of imaging Christ in the world. For an autistic person, this might be relief, or it might just be swamping one kind of sensory torture for another: the replacement of candles and incense with white walls and fluorescent lighting for instance does not necessarily remove idols or distractions from churches. This is not to say that we should not remove sensory stumbling blocks and accommodate the needs of autistic members – we absolutely should! But this is a task of spiritual discernment as much as it is one of event management. Moreover, it is a task of spiritual discernment that as far as is possible autistic members of a congregation must be invited to participate in alongside their brothers and sisters in Christ.

The fact that autistic people commonly perceive the world differently is an important reminder that the human sensory experience is partially-constructed and fallible. This subjectivity might seem to devalue the theological importance of the sensory world. If we can’t be sure of what we touch, smell, see, and hear, then how can sensory experience be a sure basis for gaining theological knowledge? A positive empiricist may indeed find this disturbing, but it need not worry us too much. Instead, this points to the active role of the Holy Spirit in inspiring and illuminating our perception of the world. Considering the central role that cognitive science gives the imagination in sensory perception, it might be that we need to speak more as Amos Yong does of a “pneumatological imagination” in how the material world mediates divine presence to us and enables us to speak to God in a way that is beyond any human’s natural capacities (Yong, 2007, pp. 10–14). As we shall see below, this empowerment is not a unilateral act of the Spirit, but one we can participate in through doxological practices of prophetic-inclusion and shared communication.

Perceiving God through a new Christian theory of mind

Both the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament affirm that no one has or can safely see God directly (Exodus 33:20, John 1:18, 6:46, 1 John 4:12, 1 Timothy 6:16). To do so, it seems, would be a danger to the human because the holiness of God would be a kind of sensory overload. We might say (and I mean this non-metaphorically) that all humanity is hyper-/and hypo-sensitive to the presence of God (although this is for different reasons to autism). Scripture is filled with directives to perceive God; to “taste and see that the Lord is God” (Ps. 34:8), to “seek the Lord while he may be found” (Is. 55:6), and even to “seek my face” (2 Chron. 7:14; Ps. 27:8). Such directives are often social in nature, that is they are spoken to a community and require just relations between members and a shared vision; “No one has ever seen God; if we love another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” (1 Jn 4:12).

In his influential text Perceiving God, William Alston defends perception as a state of consciousness where something presents itself to a subject as so-and-so; as looking purple, as smelling peaty, as sounding loud, etc. (Alston, 1991, p. 38). If perception is just a matter of something appearing as such-and-such, then God can be perceived as the taste of bread, as the sound of music, as the smell of roses without there being any worries that these sensory perceptions limit God, constrain divine freedom, or violate the Creator-creature divide.

This brings us to a well-known theological question: How do we account for encountering and discerning the particular, special, revelatory presence of God in discrete times and places, whilst also affirming divine omnipresence and transcendence? When searching for God’s presence and the activity of the Spirit in the contemporary world we appear to be both overrun with possible information and lacking in sure or certain identifiable data points. Whilst this problem remains an enigma in academic theology, we might say that the Church has developed a practical solution. The liturgies of worship – whether these be ornate and highly scripted, or more minimalist and spontaneous – train participants to feel the presence of God, to hear the word of God, to smell the aroma of God, and to taste the body of God. This is not to say that the presence of God is confined to the church, but that the practices of Christian worship train participants to perceive God in various ways (Coakley, 2013, pp. 137–38). We must not consider this purely a matter of human effort or endeavor, but a work of the Holy Spirit in and through various liturgical actions that move us through the drama of creation, confession of sin, and reconciliation. The Spirit overcomes the impossibility of human perception of God, such that we can perceive God as smelling, looking, and feeling a certain way.

As Brock argues by quoting Martin Luther, “the words of God are not empty air, but things very great and wonderful, which we see with our eyes and feel with our hands” (Luther, 1968, 32; quoted in Brock, 2019, 45). God’s word and presence do not come to us apart from the sensory material environment in which we find ourselves as embodied persons. We must be clear here: hearing God or tasting God we are not doing so apart from the ordinary sensory experience, but through and with ordinary sensory experience. I am not making an analogy between a material sense and a spiritual sense, as if these work on two different levels or involve different cognitive processes. Instead, our sensory environment is our spiritual environment. This is why the difference of autistic sensory experience can be so illuminating. To see, feel, hear, and smell the world differently is to offer a unique perspective – not necessarily better or worse in and of itself – on the words of God. For example, Barbra Newman recalls a friend with autism who recognizes others by smell saying, “I know all of you are looking forward to seeing Jesus in heaven, but I can’t wait to smell him” (Timpe, n.d., “Disability in Heaven,” 07:29). It seems that this friend might have something to teach non-autistic people about carrying the “aroma of Christ” (2 Corinthians 2:15).

Whilst I cannot see God, perhaps we can. How is it that if no one can perceive God, we together can? This is because the sensory perception of our world is not just subjective and partially constructed, it is also intersubjective and constructed-via-communication. T. M. Luhrmann’s examination of Vineyard churches in the United States concludes that what is happening in such evangelical-charismatic services is a training “to identify some thoughts as God’s voice, some images as God’s suggestions, some sensations as God’s touch or the response to his nearness” (Luhrmann, 2012, pp.xxi). Luhrmann calls this a “new Christian theory of mind” (Luhrmann, 2012, 40). She is not taking about a new set of theories about what the human mind is or how it functions, but a new skill in engaging in joint attention with God and identifying some thoughts as belonging to another mind, the mind of God.

In this way, Luhrmann’s concept of a new Christian theory of mind parallels the theory of mind literature in psychology, although the two are not identical. In psychology, theory of mind refers to the ability to understand that other people have different mental states (beliefs, intentions, desires, etc.) to oneself and to predict what those might be in different circumstances (either through joint/shared attention, through the interpretation of facial expressions, words or actions, or through empathy). The idea that autism specifies an impaired or different theory of mind has been a dominate psychological theory of autism for some time, although it is by no means certain and has received critique in recent years. What is interesting about Luhrmann’s idea that listening to God may require a new, even more porous, theory of mind, is that it implies that Christian worship employs, but is not synonymous with, natural psychological capacities of the majority (or the minority). Instead, to identify and interpret some phenomena as spiritually salient requires the aid of the Holy Spirit and the aid of our brothers and sisters in discernment. Growing in this Christian theory of mind is not something that can be done alone, it is an inherently communal form of training and practical wisdom (this point is also true for the development of the more mundane theory of mind). Again, this speaks to the potential benefit of worshiping together with persons whose theory of mind might be differently calibrated, to loosen one’s alliance on natural capacities and learn to see the world in new ways. As Brock writes, “Believers are drawn into the community of praise precisely because they do not know how to praise” (Brock, 2019, p. 79). Learning to worship together is one of the primary means of learning to perceive and attend to the divine presence.

Establishing a world in common

Worshiping together will be especially fruitful and transformative if the gathered congregation is diverse. As all parts of the body need one another (Brock, 2019, pp. 203–224), so “the symbolic world of any and every other is something I need to enhance and complete my own” (Williams, 2014, 117). However, those that perceive the world differently are also likely to be the hardest to communicate with; and this is interwoven. It is no surprise that autistic people can struggle to participate in a majority non-autistic social and sensory world, because these are far more interlinked than we often realize. Those with whom we communicate most easily are those who we share our sensory world with. This is why disability has a prodigious power “to expand communicative bandwidth” (Brock, 2019, p. 6), such that learning to “hear bodily gestures as spoken words” is also a way to train oneself to hear God and respond in love and faithfulness (Brock, 2019, p. 52). Brock equates learning “to pay new forms of attention” to those who communicate differently with “discovering what it means to inhabit Christian praise” (Brock, 2019, p. 97).

Sensory communication is not a simple stimulus-and-response system, but humans automatically select, organize, and interpret stimuli. When the brain is overloaded, we narrow our focus and seek others to confirm and reinforce (or reassure us in) our perceptions. Similarly, when we receive more detailed sensory information time can (unconsciously) appear to flow faster and will need to be slowed or controlled through routine and repeated patterns (Vogel, et al., 2019). Coping with such sensory overload is one theory about why many hypersensitive autistic people practice repetitive “stimming” behaviors (McCaskill, 2019, pp. 22–23). Whilst often perceived as involuntary asocial behaviors, autistic people describe stimming as “embodied semiosis” (Nolan & McBride, 2015, p. 1070), as “a rhetorical move” and “a kind of literacy” (Yergeau, 2012, 03:12). Joining in these behaviors allows friends and family to connect socially by connecting sensorily. Yergeau, an autistic scholar, writes,

It’s just wonderful to me when I’m around a group of other autistic people. Our bodies form a chorus, because we’re doing things with our hands. We’re doing things with our whole bodies, with our faces. We’re moving a certain way. And this is autistic space. And this is autistic and rhetorical space (Yergeau, 2012, 03:00–03:17).

In many ways that autistic rhetorical space parallels and reveals the nature of liturgical space. This might be one way that autistic persons share in the priesthood of all believers, by contributing to the creation of liturgical space for perceiving and communicating God’s presence.

Therapist Phoebe Caldwell has learnt that to establish relationship and communication with a non-verbal autistic person, one must mirror or copy the movements and sounds that they are making – even when these appear uncontrolled, erratic, or asocial. Caldwell describes such mirroring and partnering in stimming behaviors as a way of saying, “what you are doing is not just yours; it is heard and can be followed. His [the autistic person’s] brain is put in the position of saying, ‘Hey, that’s my sound (or rhythm) but I did not make it.’ I want him to look outside of himself for the source of ‘his’ utterances” (Caldwell, 2006, p. 115). As Rowan Williams argues, what might seem paradigmatic of autism here is, in fact, true of all human communication (Williams, 2014, pp. 95–103). We must learn to speak together when we do not have the words or gestures, in order to learn that all our utterances have a source that is beyond us; “For we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (Rom. 8:28).

Communication is not merely depositing information, but “establishing a world in common” (Williams, 2014, p. 99). Learning to communicate with one another is to share a communal world. Learning to communicate together with God is to partner with God’s reconstruction of the world, the coming of the Kingdom. What we are left with, then, is the very practical importance of repetitive, bodily communication in liturgies to teach us how to perceive God’s presence and speak of God as one body, the body of Christ.

Conclusion

Brian Brock’s Wondrously Wounded stands in continuity with much recent disability theology, particularly in his concern to move churches and wider society beyond mere accessibility and inclusivity. However, Brock’s doxological approach also takes us beyond how the prophetic vocation of those labeled disabled has usually been understood. Expressing a concern that I share, that the prophetic thesis might not be good news for those labeled disabled, Brock sees Adam as not only judgment but also annunciation, not only as wounded but also as wondrous. This, as I have argued in the first section of this paper, should be read not as a total rejection of either the inclusivist or prophetic impulse in disability theology, but the combination and expansion of both to give rise to a new theology of praise and worship.

Beginning from Brock’s theology of worship, I have explored how some of the idiosyncrasies of living with autism reveal deep theological realities about the church’s worship, and therefore about the human condition more broadly. This can also be read as a response to John Swinton’s recent challenge: “It is not that we need to ‘learn from the disabled.’ The challenge is how we all can learn from one another in ways that take the inherent diversity of the Body of Jesus seriously, not as a metaphor but as a lived reality” (Swinton, 2020, p. 187). This challenge makes clear, as I said above, that autistic Christians (along with all those labeled disabled) are to be accommodated and listened to in Christian worship, not because it is the politically correct thing to do, nor primarily due to fear of judgment, nor because of some dubious idea of spiritual superpowers that are tied to physical or cognitive impairments quite apart from the person’s individuality. Instead, autistic Christians participate as equals, as brothers and sisters, in the address of God and in the church’s response to God.

As an expression of this equal participation of autistic Christians in the church’s worship and as people through whom the Spirit dispenses Her gifts to the church, I have sought to bring out the benefit that varieties of embodiment bring to the church’s worship. On the one hand, the participation of autistic persons in the body of Christ highlights all humanity’s need for the Holy Spirit’s illumination of the material world to perceive and respond to the presence of God. On the other hand, in this act of the Spirit humans are not wholly passive, because the experience of autism also highlights how the sensory environments that we create in worship can be a means by which the Spirit teaches us all to sense and respond to the presence of Christ in the world. But for this to work as it should just relations and attentive, sympathetic communication between persons are far more important than aesthetics. Only by acting together can we communicate to one another the world that we share as the Spirit unveils the Kingdom of God in our midst.

Additional information

Funding

This article was made possible by a grant from the TheoPysch project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation.